Gnosticism is an esoteric religious movement which has flourished in the first centuries AD. It offers a truly unique view on existence, and blends theology, mysticism and cosmology. Divine wisdom, human redemption, and cosmic error - these are the foremost themes of the Gnostic creation myth, which is itself a compelling alternative to the traditional Judeo-Christian narratives. And at the very center of this creation myth lies Sophia, a central figure of Gnosticism, whose actions and consequences set the stage for the creation of the material world and humanity’s spiritual struggle. The my ..read more

As genetic research into the characteristics of ancient DNA has increased, scientists have uncovered a wealth of valuable information about how prehistoric people really lived. In a study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of experts from the United Kingdom, Austria, and the United States, led by archaeologist Penny Bickle from the University of York, evidence emerged to show that Neolithic agricultural communities in Europe were highly mobile and deeply interconnected. Furthermore, the people who lived in them enjoyed a suprising amount of individual freedom and gender equality, with th ..read more

Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Kevin Hatala & Purity Kiura/The Conversation Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same – they record instants in the lives of many different extinct organisms, back to the earliest creatures that walked on four feet, 380 million years ago. Discoveries in eastern Africa of tracks made by hominins – our ancient relatives – are telling paleontologists like ourselves about the behavior of hominin species that walked on two feet and resem ..read more

Scattered over 700,000 square kilometers (270, 271 sq mi) in the southern Pacific Ocean are the Tonga islands. On one of the 176 islands that make up Tonga, there stands one of the strangest megalithic monuments in the Pacific, a trilithon called Ha’amonga ‘a Maui (A carrying stick/burden of Maui). Read more Section:  Artifacts Other Artifacts News Ancient Places Australia & Oceania Read Later  ..read more

Ancient Romans reportedly ingested the brains of a bream called the dreamfish to get high, and modern scholarly studies have confirmed the toxicity and hallucination-inducing qualities of the Sarpa salpa bream. Hallucinogenic fish live in the Mediterranean Sea, near the Hawaiian and other Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean and are also present in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. The fish is part of the diet of the people of Tunisia, France and Israel but is deemed uneatable in Spain and Italy. There are eight families of bream fish and more than 15 species worldwide that get people intox ..read more

A circle of corroded bronze, measuring 12 inches (30cm) across, adorned with golden shapes, was unwittingly discovered in 1999 in Nebra, Germany, now famously coined the Nebra Sky Disc. More than 3,600-years-old, it is widely considered to be the oldest known depiction of the cosmos. It is currently the subject of a new study, where metallurgical analysis has indicated that it was manufactured using a complex, hot-forging process, with ten cycles of heating up to 700°C! Bombshell Study Calls Astronomical Theories of the Nebra Sky Disk “Obsolete” Why a Replica of the 3,600-Year-Old Nebra Sky ..read more

Once again Ancient Origins has been blocked by Facebook for posting content deemed not fit for general consumption. This is becoming an almost monthly occurrence, with the site being put on hold for the best part of a month each time. In fact, we are not even sure the self-censored image above will make it past the Facebook automated censorship system, but these days it seems we haven’t got much to lose. Here are the latest problem images. Last month, Ancient Origins was put on hold for showing images from an Egyptian papyrus of the process of circumcision in Egypt - warning images of total ..read more

When the mad Roman Emperor Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD, his uncle Claudius ran to one of the palace's apartments and hid behind a curtain. Claudius was soon discovered by the praetorian guards and escorted to their camp, where he was introduced to the troops who proclaimed him emperor. Despite being the youngest son of Nero Drusus (brother of Emperor Tiberius) and Antonia the younger (daughter of Mark Antony and Emperor Augustus’ sister Octavia), Claudius was never a front-runner to be the Roman Emperor. Deemed an embarrassment at court due to his poor health and alarming lack of soci ..read more

A pair of scientists who study hominin fossils and human evolution in China and East Asia claim to have discovered a new human ancestor that appeared during the Late Quaternary or Middle Pleistocene era, about 300,000 years ago. They have named this species Homo juluensis, which is in reference to the unusually large size of this theoretical addition to the official hominin roster (ju lu means “huge head” in Chinese). This discovery did not emerge as a result of any amazing new fossil finds. In fact, the fossils that the scientists say prove the existence of the new species were recovered in ..read more

Even before the rise of the great Maya civilization, the people who occupied Central America’s Yucatan Peninsula were applying their engineering skills to make the land more productive and liveable. This was made crystal clear by a recent discovery by a team of archaeologists and anthropologists, who discovered the most ancient fish-trapping operation ever identified anywhere in the region inside Belize’s largest inland wetland.   Examining imagery collected by drones and Google Earth, the researchers from the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project were fascinated by an interconne ..read more